1. Field
The invention relates to a display device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flat panel displays (“FPDs”), such as liquid crystal displays (“LCDs”) and plasma display panels (“PDPs”), are being rapidly developed to replace cathode ray tubes (“CRTs”). Of the FPDs, LCDs, unlike PDPs, cannot emit light by themselves. Thus, the LCDs use a light source. Here, the light source may be a point light source such as a light-emitting diode (“LED”) or a linear light source such as an electroluminescent lamp (“EL”) or a cold cathode fluorescent lamp (“CCFL”). In particular, the LED is being widely used as a light source for a backlight unit.
The interest in local dimming has significantly increased in order to improve contrast ratio and effectively reduce power consumption of products employing a backlight unit that uses an LED as a light source. That is, the entire screen area is divided into a plurality of blocks of equal sizes, and luminance dimming is performed on each of the blocks to correct the distortion of a gamma curve due to, e.g., the leakage of light of a panel. Accordingly, contrast ratio can be improved, and power consumption can be effectively reduced.
In local dimming using the above block-based luminance dimming method, the individual luminance of each block is extracted by taking the average of red, green and blue image data of the corresponding block received from an image board.
The local dimming using the block-based luminance dimming method can improve contrast ratio. However, there is still room for improvement when it comes to color display characteristics such as color reproducibility.